


Sew Myself Shut

by quinfish



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Harm, also it's mostly just pre-Sterek sorry, oh god the most one-sided friendship ever, spoilers through end of season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quinfish/pseuds/quinfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles learned to talk too much too young, and after a decade just talking isn't enough to keep him together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sew Myself Shut

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work that contains both specific depictions and general references to self-harm.

Stiles learned to talk too much too young. He'd always had more energy than his parents knew what to do with, running around the house or clear across a park or tripping over stories he wanted to tell or clambering into a stranger's lap and reading them picture books at the library when his parents turned their backs on him for just a moment. But the talking was just a thing, then, not a life jacket, and he could always be quieted with the right words and a look or a hug from one of his parents.

Then his mother was gone, taking with her her stories and her jokes and her songs. She was gone and she stopped cooing over his hastily scribbled attempts at art or asking eager questions when he made up stories of his own. She was gone and his father stopped chasing after him through the house or the park, his eyes going glassy, his words few and melting together, his breath smelling of something Stiles was too young to understand but which scared him and made him afraid he'd lost both parents when his mother's heart beat once and failed to repeat itself.

His house wasn't home anymore, too full of a ringing emptiness except for when his father was sobbing or breaking things. It was a constant, heavy lack that triggered his first panic attack when he was six. He endured it alone, gasping in his bedroom, sweating, certain (not relieved not relieved he couldn't be relieved) that he was following his mother. It passed after an eternity and he could hear his father crying on the other side of the wall, his father who had been so deafened by the silence that he couldn't hear his own son dying.

He began murmuring to himself then, a story his mother used to tell him, to bury the noises his father was making. And he never stopped talking.

It didn't help him secure friends, but it gave himself an anchor, gave his father something to cling to. It was an imperfect solution, but it was enough for the Stilinskis to claw their way back to--not normalcy, never normalcy again. But functionality, at least. Or something enough like it that no one asked questions.

Stiles' father returned to work, but they never talked about it-not what they'd lost, not what he'd reduced himself to in his refusal to face his new reality, not the fact that the only reason his son had anyone at all to talk to in school was because Scott McCall was too single minded and stubborn to be chased off by Stiles' constant, desperate talking.

But then, Scott could almost understand, in a way that no one else could. Even the dullest of children has a certain amount of intuition. Scott never missed the tension between his parents, the way his mother would sometimes flinch when his father moved too quickly. It wasn't the same, but it was more than anyone else knew.

Stiles talked, Scott listened, they grew up, they helped each other. Scott held Stiles' hand when middle school health class tried to warn them clinically of the dangers of alcoholism and Stiles had to sprint from the room, remembering the silence and his father's breath and the emptiness. Stiles took more Adderall than was strictly wise to stay focused and coach Scott through lessons that overwhelmed him when they reached high school together. They ribbed at each other for sucking at lacrosse and refused to let each other quit when anyone else made them feel those same athletic inadequacies. 

They stayed together. Stiles talked through it all.

And then one day, Scott stopped listening. 

 

Stiles wants to blame it on the werewolf bite thing. That would distract anybody from anything--it sure as hell distracts Stiles, who mutters his way through nights of research and hops himself up on enough caffeine and sugar to be able to relay his discovery with all the force it warrants. Because lycanthropy. Out of fucking nowhere.

And Scott listens. Sort of. He’s got a spread of new improved senses to be exploring, and that’s, well it sucks, but it’s fair. Until he starts using them to explore one Allison Argent. A pretty girl traipses in and smiles when he offers her a pen, and just like that he starts slipping away. He never leaves, never all the way, but every now and then Stiles will be talking and he’ll realize that while Scott is present, he isn’t there. He isn’t listening. 

Ten years of progress crumble underneath his feet and the emptiness of a hospital room takes hold of his wrist, nuzzles against the crook of his neck.

He excuses himself , claims nausea, in the middle of lunch. Scott waves him away, his eyes locked on Allison as Stiles all but sprints out of the school. His hands shake on his Jeep’s steering wheel and he doesn’t have the breath to scream the way he wants to.

He begins driving before it’s finished, hits a raccoon on the road. He starts talking again, swearing, and he is not crying for the animal, sometimes he just likes to practice different breathing patterns and today it’s hitched. He keeps talking as he parks on a diagonal across the driveway. He pauses just long enough to take more sleeping pills than is strictly wise, and then he keeps talking as he flops face-first onto his bed. He keeps up a litany of nonsense words as he sobs into his pillow.

When his father returns home from work early after receiving a phone call saying that Stiles had disappeared halfway through the school day, he opens Stiles’ bedroom door with a lecture coiled around his tongue.

But his son is asleep, and his cheeks are still wet with his tears as he clutches desperately at his pillow, his fingers curled like claws into the soft material.  
Even unconscious, Stiles is talking. 

 

He stops talking to his father. He still says words at the man--Stiles is always saying words at whoever happens to be around at any given moment--but a distance doesn’t so much creep its way between them as it is suddenly forced there. Stiles spends most of his time talking to werewolves now, and while he’s been able to spin stories out of anything for as long as he could talk, this is a truth he doesn’t know how to tell, and the lying is getting harder.

But he makes it work. He vomits too many words too quickly for any of them to be examined too carefully, and saves his real talking for Scott, who still hasn’t remembered how to listen, and Derek, who is all too happy to throw him against hard surfaces to make him stop.

It’s impossibly lonely.

He steals the bottle of Jack that he’s not comfortable with his father owning despite near a full decade of the man having himself under control with it, and he steps outside to explore what it was that had been so compelling about it.

It burns on the way down, but it's a nice hurt that gives way to a heavy warmth in his belly and eventually his teeth start to tingle and the world cants from side to side. He keeps drinking until it doesn’t hurt going down anymore and he’s surprised by the fact that he misses it. 

He punches a tree to bring it back, and he can’t help but laugh at the sharp sting of it or the small pieces of bark he knocks free or the blood that wells up and trickles between his fingers. He watches it follow the planes of his hand down to his wrist and he keeps laughing as something compels him to lick it clean. It tastes like copper and something new. 

 

Scott notices immediately that something is wrong as he slides into the Jeep’s passenger seat. He sniffs, and stiffens, whipping his head to look at Stiles.

“Why do I smell blood?” he demands, and for the first time since the bite and the first time since Allison, his attention is fixed entirely, unwaveringly, on his friend.

Stiles shrugs and lifts his loosely bandage hand, wiggling his fingers. “Got excited,” he lies easily. “Had a bit of a run-in with a window, no big.”

“Dude-”

“Wait, no, I take it back,” Stiles says, because Scott is listening again. “That’s a shit story. You should see the other guy, that’s what I meant to say and no that’s too vague oh oh oh I totally punched Derek in the face and he slunk back to that shell he calls a house to lick his wounds which, I might add, are totally worse than this.”

He resumes driving, beaming at his friend all the while.

“Alright, even if that wasn’t obviously complete bullshit,” Scot says, and there’s a smirk to his voice that hasn’t been there since Allison turned him gooey, “I can totally hear you lying. You walked into a spiderweb and freaked out again, didn’t you?”

“That happened once!” Stiles squawks. “When we were nine. You have got to stop bringing that up, dude. Not cool.”

Scott laughs and he doesn’t press it any further. Stiles clenches his hand experimentally around the wheel. His knuckles throb. 

They talk. Scott listens.

It’s good

 

It doesn’t last. It never fucking lasts because Allison fucking Argent is a dear sweet wonderful girl whose family has a long illustrious history of killing people like Scott and somehow that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, apparently, except for the curve of her smile, or her scent, or the bell-tone of her voice and Stiles swears that if he has to listen to much more of Scott’s gushing he’s going to find the closest available hard surface and bash his own head against it until everything stops.

He fidgets instead, and since no one is listening he starts biting at his nails. Scott doesn’t notice, not until he’s been at it for a few days and he bites just a little too far and there’s a bright little hurt and a bead of red welling out of the quick. Scott whirls to him immediately, and for all that Stiles waves him off and scowls at the offending nail before sucking on it, he can feel the werewolf’s attention always half on him for the rest of the day.

Stiles observes, because that’s what Stiles does, and he packs that away. 

 

He doesn’t sleep for a week after Peter--after Lydia--fuck it. After that. He tries, once, but his dreams feature a honeyed voice dancing through sharp teeth and Lydia falling and blood and he’s not sure who it belongs to.

He takes to wandering instead, bottle of whiskey in hand and in mouth and making way to brain and liver. He mumbles to himself, about Scott who he shouldn’t love as much as he does, about Allison who he wants to be able to hate, and about Derek. Derek Hale, who throws him against walls and who snarls at him and who threatens his life on a regular basis. Derek Hale, who he ought to hate but who has been so broken by everything that it just wouldn’t be fair to. Derek Hale, who had protected Stiles from a werewolf who was supposed to be catatonic, when it would have been so easy to leave him to fend for himself, especially when said werewolf was his only living flesh and blood. Derek Hale who was desperately beautiful and who he found himself missing, somehow, now that Scott--and therefore Stiles--was no longer speaking to him. 

“The cure was only a theory,” he mutters to the best friend who isn’t even there as thoughts of Hales guide his feet towards the woods. “Not even a theory. Barely even a hypothesis. And you would’ve been a terrible Alpha and you’ve still got your stupid girlfriend anyway so what the hell is the big deal.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Stiles knows it is probably a bad idea to be wandering into the woods at night, drunk and alone. But Peter was about as dead as dead got so it would be safe and if it isn’t and he gets mauled by an impossible thing well then someone would be obligated to listen to him and maybe then he’d remember what it felt like to breathe normally, instead of with this knot in his chest like he’s constantly on the verge of falling to pieces.  
He foregoes paths, stopping every few yards to take another pull of whiskey as he staggers through the trees. 

“And you’ve still got me,” he slurs, picking up his conversation with imaginary Scott. “But I guess you’ve always had me so that doesn’t count because what the fuck do I matter right?” He takes another pull at the bottle, and when it’s empty he suddenly discovers that he loathes it.

He curses and hurls the thing against a tree, where it doesn’t even have the decency to shatter. It just clatters to the ground, and settles with a little rustling into the underbrush.

“Oh, fuck you,” he spits, grasping the bottle by the neck before slamming it into tree. “Fuck you you fucking worthless fucking piece of shit.”

He’s shouting by the time it breaks, bursting into a shower of glass that bounces harmlessly off of his flannel. Except for one shard that has buried itself into the meat of his palm.

For a moment he is silent, watching himself bleed, entranced by the path of warm red down his skin. 

He doesn’t laugh this time. But barely, and only because he is interrupted.

“Stiles,” says a voice from behind him. 

He bites his lip around a twitch of a smile as he turns to see Derek standing there. He’s scowling, he’s alway scowling, but it’s not the usual scowl. Something in the knit of his brows whispers of concern rather than aggravation, and that thought it absurd enough to pull a hiccupping little laugh out of Stiles.

“Stiles, are you drunk?” Derek demands--and it’s never just asking, never a casual inquiry with Derek Hale, always demanding--and steps forward.

“You could say that,” Stiles says, and something small in Derek’s expression changes and oh fuck someone is listening talk talk go go go. “You could say a lot of things, though. Anything, really, I guess, except for the things that there aren’t words for but sometimes there are words for those things in other languages so I guess maybe someone who’s bilingual could actually say more things than someone who’s not, not just saying things in more ways.”

Derek kneels in front of Stiles, gently takes his wrist in one broad hand and Stiles has never known Derek to be gentle so for a second he just sort of gapes while the werewolf plucks the glass out of Stiles’ hand and then tears off a strip of his own shirt to give the bleeding wound at least a rudimentary bandage.

“What happened?” he asks.

Stiles shrugs. “Can’t say. Not sure if I don’t know like I don’t know why you’re here or if there aren’t words like there aren’t words for how much I fucking hate myself all the fucking time, Derek. All the fucking time.”

Something that Stiles can’t name flickers across Derek’s face and Stiles waits to be told to shut up but it doesn’t happen. Derek stays quiet, but it’s not the same sort of quiet as usual, the brooding quiet or the waiting until the annoying human just leaves quiet. It’s the quiet of someone actually listening, not just hearing that words are being said but actually processing them, turning them over, committing them to memory. 

Stiles’ eyes sting with a wet heat and blunt fingers massage the pressure point in his wrist, soothing and quieting him, and still Derek listens until he is asleep.

For once in a long time, Stiles does not talk in his sleep.

 

He wakes up in his own bed, his head foggy and his palm throbbing, with only vague memories of the previous night. He breathes deeply, smells greenery and musk, before flopping onto his stomach to groan into his pillow.

He showers too hot for comfort, scrubs too hard, tries to purge himself of the things he can’t remember saying. By the time he finishes, his skin is raw, the fragile scab on his palm ripped away and oozing.

He swears, dressing the wound before dressing himself, muttering about his own idiocy. His father is already gone, so he does not stop, not until he’s reached school. Scott is there in a moment, his eyes a brief flash of gold.

“You smell like blood,” he says, his voice tight. “Why do you smell like blood?”

“Probably because of the bleeding,” Stiles says, holding his hand out. Scott grabs his wrist, breathes deeply, and growls.

“You smell like Derek.”

“I ran into him in the woods last night, it’s no big deal,” Stiles says, pulling his hand back.  
Scott’s eyes narrow. “There’s more you’re not telling me,” he says, and for the first time Stiles wishes his friend would listen less, just this once.

“Look, just because you’re pissed at the guy doesn’t mean I need to rearrange my life to make sure I never see him again,” Stiles says, and the heat in his voice is new. “It may come as a shock to you, but you are not, in fact, the crux on which my life balances.

He stalks away, and feels the treacherous hitch in his own pulse.

“Stiles,” Scott begins, but stops as Allison pulls into the parking lot.

Stiles curls his hands into fists, relishes the sting of it. “Just leave it,” he mutters.

Scott slinks away, but he watches Stiles.

He doesn’t see him say more than three words together all day.

 

He watches someone die. Not a werewolf, not any sort of monster, just a guy, crushed slowly beneath Stiles’ Jeep. He can’t move, can’t speak, can’t do a damn thing but be quietly, brutally grateful that there’s no scream. He will have nightmares enough without hearing that, without seeing the spray of red on the floor. He complains about not being able to drive himself home, but inside he’s not sure he’ll ever feel comfortable behind his own wheel again. His father takes his statement, because that’s what Sheriffs do, and sends him home with a deputy.

Stiles knows he should tell Scott, or he should tell Derek, but he can’t remember how to breathe. He clings to the kitchen counter, his knees shaking, refusing to fall. To fall would be to stay on the ground, immobile, remembering the hiss of ruptured hydraulics and imagining the screams that should have been.

It’s selfish to think that he can’t breathe, but his air only comes in gasps and he can’t focus on anything but the finality of the silence. He can’t talk himself through it, can’t hear himself think over the storm of his own pulse, and he’s falling. He grabs blindly as he tumbles to the ground, finds himself gripping a six-inch utility knife.

There’s no thinking as he slides the blade of it against his bicep, cutting through flannel as easily as his skin. There’s just a desperate need for something to break the fear and the stillness and the crushing weight of his own uselessness. It’s a line of bright heat, searing across his skin, and he gasps. Not the panicked half-breaths of an attack, but the roaring, full-chested gulp of a man breaking the surface after being held underwater just short of too long.

“Fuck,” he whispers, letting the knife fall from his shaking fingers. It clatters against the floor and he can’t make himself care that his blood is hot as it slides down his arm and pools on the floor. He can breathe, and he can think, and he lets himself revel in these truths for a long minute.  
But not too long. His father will be home, and if there’s blood there will be questions that he doesn’t know how to answer. So he forces himself to stand, forces himself to move.

Stiles has no idea how to stitch himself closed, but he read once that the military uses super glue for quick fixes in the middle of combat. His layers are discarded, thrown into the back of his closet where no one will look, and he cleans and glues the cut without looking at it as much as he can. A change of clothes, and except for the pallor of his skin there’s no sign that anything has happened at all.

Then it’s bleach and scrubbing with music blaring, a sentinel against the quiet because for once he has no idea what to say, not even to himself. So he cleans, means to do no more than remove the stain, but by the time he realizes what he’s doing the entire kitchen is spotless.  
Only then, when he knows his voice won’t tremble, does he call Scott. Information is relayed quickly, efficiently, and they say nothing else. Stiles tumbles into bed feeling empty, and curls around himself. He falls asleep running a thumb over the raised line on his arm.

 

The scars accumulate over time, short but deep, scattered across his chest, on his hips, anywhere that he can easily hide. He learns to dress quickly for lacrosse, facing the lockers, shielding his body from prying eyes.

Scott can tell that something’s wrong, but the blood-smell comes so frequently that he tells himself he’s imagining it. He doesn’t ask--there’s no vocabulary for his fears and no time to find it. Dealing with the Kanima is too important. 

So Stiles carries on, collecting pale reminders of his failures. A long pull over his heart for his father’s job, a shallow stab for each deputy Matt murders. An x on his bicep for Melissa McCall’s world shifting beyond recognition. Little nicks to calm him after his weekly nightmares. A tally on one leg for every blow Gerard dealt him because he was stupid and because he was weak, to send a message that wasn’t even received.

And then it’s done. In a flurry, Matt is dead, Jackson sheds his scales for fur and claws, and Gerard is...gone. There’s no body, and for all that Stiles needs it to be over, he’s not stupid. Nothing’s final without a corpse.

Scott still doesn’t ask. The silence has become routine, and Stiles talks more than ever, refusing to give him an opening.

He reads aloud to himself at night, too drained, too tense to think of anything new to say. He drifts, but jolts back to himself with every moving shadow, each time certain that now is when Gerard returns to drag him into the night and leave him there, broken and impossible to find. The pocket knife under his pillow becomes as much a matter of defending himself as providing a focus when his world threatens to fly apart.

It’s in his hand in an instant when his window slides open from the outside, and just as quickly pulled away. His pulse spikes and he’s too damn scared to shout, his voice trapped in the knot that’s taken up residence between his lungs. He manages to stand, prepares to flee.

“Stiles.” Derek’s voice is a gentle, quiet thing, but because he is who he is there’s no removing the traces of a command. “We need to talk.”

“What happened?” Stiles asks, calming as his mind slips easily into gathering information. “What do you need me to look up? It’s Gerard, isn’t it? He’s turned into some sort of mutant fish thing, hasn’t he? Or Peter’s lost his mind. More. Again.”

He’s cut off with a low, warning growl, and some instinct pulls him into stillness. Derek flips the knife open, and his eyes flash a brief red.

“This reeks of your blood,” he spits before closing it and throwing it out the open window. “Care to explain how that happened?”

There is a long moment, the silence broken only by their breath. Derek growls again, and the instinct to deflect born a decade ago responds before Stiles does.

“There’s nothing to explain,” he says, his words flat and hard. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

Another silence, and Derek’s brows knit together, his mouth falling ever so slightly open. Stiles looks down at his own feet, drums his fingers randomly against his desk, desperate to fill the silence.

“You actually believe that,” Derek says at last, and if it was any two other people talking, Stiles would peg the tremble in his voice as horror. 

“What I believe doesn’t matter,” Stiles spits, and the drumming turns into the sudden slam of his palm onto the hard surface. “The truth matters. And the truth is you shouldn’t even be here. Don’t you have a pack to be running around the woods with, or whatever the hell it is you people do when you’re not ruining my life?”

Derek’s hand is a heavy weight on his. “You are pack,” he hisses. “You don’t see the shit you’ve seen, you don’t help us the way you have, without becoming a part of it. We’re worried about you.” He takes a long, slow breath, and his hand traces up Stiles’ arm, pushing up the short sleeve of his shirt, until he finds the first scar, still bright red and blotchy. “I’m worried about you.”

Stiles jerks away when fingers brush over the mark, and Derek pulls his hands back and in front of him. “Get out,” Stiles whispers, his words struggling around the knot between his lungs. 

“Let me help you.”

“Get out!” Stiles repeats, this time in a shout. His knees wobble, and Derek’s hands are there, steadying him, pulling him forward.

It is a long moment before Stiles understands that he is being embraced, and when he does he cannot stop the tears that well up in his eyes. He lets his head fall forward, and he tangles his fingers in the front of Derek’s shirt.

“Tell me what you need.” The werewolf’s chest rumbles as he speaks, and his breath is a warmth ghosting through Stiles’ hair. It’s a whispered request, a sharp tug that pulls at the knot in his heart. 

“Please don’t ask me that,” Stiles begs, his voice muffled. “You can’t fix this.”

“Tell me anyway.”

He takes a shuddering breath before pulling away. His eyes meet Derek’s for a moment, and then he pulls his shirt off, tugs away his jeans. In his boxers, with every scar visible, he spreads his arms and displays himself. The sharp intake of Derek’s breath is a controlled step away from a snarl. His hand twitches forward, but Stiles stills him with a glare and a shake of his head.  
“I need to be smarter,” he says, his voice calm now as he smoothes a palm over the tally marks on his right leg. “I need to be faster--” his fingers connect the dots in the constellation for the deputies, just above his left hip-- “I need to be able to make all the shit that’s happened make sense--” he traces the x for Scott’s mother-- “I need to be the son my father deserves--” his voice catches here and he presses his hand just left of his sternum, and his tears begin again as his touch lands on a deep gouge in his left side, still raw-- “I need my mother.”

He can’t breathe again, and Derek’s arms are around him at once. Stiles lets his bones go loose, lets himself be carried into bed, lets himself be tucked up against Derek’s chest as he sobs. He digs a nail into the oldest scar, and he can barely even understand himself when he gasps “I need someone to see me.”

Derek lets him cry, rubbing soothing circles into the back of his neck with one hand, the other darting from scar to scar, pressing along them as if trying to wipe them away.

“I see you,” he murmurs when finally Stiles is still and quiet.

He’s tired and he’s frightened, but the ringing silence that has followed him for years reverberates quietly with those words. He lets himself believe, lets himself be cradled and soothed to sleep.

There are no nightmares, no words, and when he wakes up, he is not alone.


End file.
